Temporal Benefits of Prosperity

Your kingdom come, your will be done.” Matthew 6:10

I have been doing a lot of funerals lately, which really keeps my focus on eternal things. One day while studying I came across a story I think is important for us to remember in this material focused world in which we live.

Goodyear. Rockefeller. Pulitzer. Vanderbilt. Morgan. Macy. Gould. Crane. Astor. These celebrated millionaires represented only the most highly visible names from the membership rolls of the powerful Jekyll Island Club. In 1886 some of the East Coast’s most prominent millionaires purchased a coastal island near Georgia for a hunting preserve and winter family retreat. By the early 1900s, members had informally linked together to form one of the most powerful, wealthy, and influential earthly kingdoms ever known.

Members of the exclusive, Jekyll Island Club controlled one-sixth of the world’s wealth, forging together an alliance that virtually controlled America’s corporations and government—the railroads, the banks, the industrial complex, the significant inventions. The concentration of power at the Jekyll Island Club represented the zenith to which men can orchestrate temporal kingdoms.

Today however, the Jekyll Island Club is history. Curious visitors wander among a half -dozen restored buildings scattered around the grounds. The overgrowth of weeds, the peeling paint, the shattered glass—all symbols of the futility of man-made kingdoms. The once posh winter “cottages” lay in ruin, illustrating the brief standing given to the temporal kingdoms of man. Though they once commanded one-sixth of the world’s wealth, these power brokers have two things in common with every other man of their era: All their plans have come and gone, and they are all dead.

“What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?” (Matthew 16:26). All the benefits of prosperity are temporal. No matter how affluent and influential we become we will not find eternal profit from temporal kingdoms. Despite all our prosperity, we must still come daily to the foot of the Cross of the Lord Jesus Christ to inherit an eternal kingdom. Tread lightly in your temporal kingdoms, all your plans will come to an end, and then you die. The only profit that matters is an eternal one. Invest today in the eternal not the temporal.

In His Service,
Eric Barnes


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